Evolution with Delaney!

Today’s lectures discussed the concept of fitness. Fitness is measured by the production of offspring . The more offspring an organism has, the more fit it is. Oftentimes, when people think about fitness, they think about an organism’s physical strength or prowess. While these traits can perhaps increase an organism’s fitness, they are not the organism’s fitness. EvolutionTalk covered this topic well when they said that to be fit you just have to be “ good enough ” to reproduce. In the demonstration of earth’s history on a football field, I was shocked by the short amount of time animals have been present on earth. I was aware that earth had a long history before animals came to be, but did not realize what a small percentage of earth’s history animals took up. Even more surprising was how long it took for basic multicellular organisms to develop. Another fun fact that was given was the part about T. Rex’s being closer in time to humans than the stegosaurus. I was under the impres...

     I really enjoyed the lectures from this past week. A lot of information about learning was brought to light and was new to me. One of the more interesting things in the learning lectures was the chart showing positive motivation, positive engagement, negative motivation, and negative engagement. Listed under the area of negative motivation is failure avoidance. I found it interesting that receiving grades could be considered a part of failure avoidance. After reflecting on this information for a bit, it completely makes sense. Growing up, the education system has always taught that you do not want to fail an assignment or course not so that you are learning but rather, so you do not have to repeat an assignment or course . I am excited to see how ungrading will work in this class. It is a totally new concept to me but after hearing the woes of the traditional education system, I am interested to see how it goes. These lectures were also the first time I have hea...

 Hi! I'm Delaney and I am currently working towards my degree in Biology. I plan to pursue Genetic Counseling after undergrad! I love almost all animals but my favorite animal is a dog and I could talk about them all day.